Political Vocation of Philosophy

Donatella Di Cesare is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome.

• 1. The saturated Immanence of the World2. Heraclitus, wakefulness and the original communism3. The narcosis of light: on the night of capital4. The polis: a calling5. Wonder – a troubled passion6. Between heavens and abysses7. Socrates’s atopia8. A political death9. Plato – when philosophy headed into exile within the city10. Migrants of thought11. ‘What is philosophy?’12. Radical questions13. The out-of-place of metaphysics14. Dissent and critique15. The twentieth century: breaks and traumas16. After Heidegger17. Against negotiators and normative philosophers18. Ancilla democratiae: a dejected return19. The poetry of clarity20.  Potent prophesies of the leap: Marx and Kierkegaard21. The ecstasy of existence22. For an exophilia23. The philosophy of awakening24. Fallen angels and rag-pickers25. Anarchist postscriptNotesBibliographyIndex

'Di Cesare’s limpid meditations on the tormented relations between thought and power make a passionate case for philosophy as a liminal practice looking both ways across the limits of the political.  Her figure of the philosopher as the foreigner, refugee and outsider attentive to the calls of the other and speaking in the name of an anarchic justice proposes no less than a renewal of the political vocation of philosophy for the twenty-first century.'Howard Caygill, Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London